Health Care History

Larry Brilliant's life journey has led him on a purposeful path across continents and countercultural movements, marching arm in arm with the men and women who defined a generation. A man who has always been in the right place at the right time, Brilliant has engaged with some of the most prominent thought leaders, spiritual masters, heroes, and icons in the world, including Neem Karoli Baba (Maharajji), Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, Mikhail Gorbachev, Wavy Gravy, the Grateful Dead, the Dalai Lama, and Barack Obama.

For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As cardiologist and best-selling author Sandeep Jauhar tells in The Heart, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that changed the way we live. Deftly alternating between historical episodes and his own work, Jauhar tells the colorful and little known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ.

If you have ever worn a mask against your better judgement, this book is for you. Delve into the science, psychology, and philosophy involved in the worldwide mania for face coverings. Accessible yet profoundly detailed, packed with meticulously gathered information from a diverse range of disciplines, this book earns its place as an invaluable reference in your library. Its wealth of knowledge equips you to challenge prevailing narratives and verify claims independently.

Drawn from historical records and current news headlines, A Taste for Poison weaves together the tales of spurned lovers, shady scientists, medical professionals, and political assassins to show how the precise systems of the body can be impaired to lethal effect through the use of poison. From the deadly origins of the gin and tonic cocktail to the arsenic-laced wallpaper in Napoleon’s bedroom, A Taste for Poison leads listeners on a fascinating tour of the intricate, complex systems that keep us alive - or don’t.

Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of "ordinary" womanhood. Though the world at first recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity ultimately won her the acceptance of the male medical establishment. In 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an MD. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician.

Six decades ago, visionary doctors achieved the impossible: the humble kidney, acknowledged since ancient times to be as essential to life as the heart, became the first human organ to be successfully replaced with a machine. Yet huge dialysis corporations, ambitious doctor-entrepreneurs, and Beltway lobbyists soon turned this medical miracle into an early experiment in for-profit medicine—and one of the nation's worst healthcare catastrophes. With powerful insight and on-the-ground reporting, Tom Mueller introduces an unforgettable cast of characters.

Rosemary Mahoney tells the story of Braille Without Borders, the first school for the blind in Tibet, and of Sabriye Tenberken, the remarkable blind woman who founded the school. Fascinated and impressed by what she learned from the blind children of Tibet, Mahoney was moved to investigate further the cultural history of blindness. As part of her research, she spent three months teaching at Tenberken's international training center for blind adults in Kerala, India, an experience that reveals both the shocking oppression endured by the world's blind, as well as their great resilience.

From yellow fever to smallpox to polio to AIDS to COVID-19, epidemics have prompted Americans to make choices and answer questions about their basic values and their laws. In five concise chapters, historian John Fabian Witt traces the legal history of epidemics, showing how infectious disease has both shaped, and been shaped by, the law.

In the last half of the twentieth century, Don Thomas discovered a cure for every marrow-based disease—like leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle-cell anemia—forever changing treatment for some of the deadliest illnesses. His feats were extraordinary, earning him a Nobel Prize, and the cascade of treatments he inspired have reshaped and will continue to reshape the practice of clinical medicine. Yet no one has ever written Thomas’s courageous story.Dr. Frederick R. Appelbaum, a member of Thomas’s research team, does so for the first time.

It is 1919 and Elizabeth Hughes, the 11-year-old daughter of America's most-distinguished jurist and politician, Charles Evans Hughes, has been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. It is essentially a death sentence. The only accepted form of treatment - starvation - whittles her down to 45 pounds, skin and bones. Miles away, Canadian researchers Frederick Banting and Charles Best manage to identify and purify insulin from animal pancreases - a miracle soon marred by scientific jealousy, intense business competition, and fistfights.

An estimated 10 percent of Americans are implanted with medical devices - like pacemakers, artificial hips, cardiac stents, etc. The overwhelming majority of high-risk implanted devices have never undergone a single clinical trial. The FDA lets device manufacturers decide whether to report serious complications or deaths that may have been caused by their products. Here, award-winning journalist Jeanne Lenzer brings these horrifying statistics to life through the story of one working-class man who, after his "cure" nearly kills him, ends up in a battle for justice.

As America’s favorite frontline Covid-19 health journalist, Dr. Sanjay Gupta has barely left his primetime seat in his makeshift studio basement since the pandemic began (other than to perform brain surgery). He’s had insider access to the drama’s unfolding, including exclusive conversations with the world’s top public health experts and behind-the-scenes scientists racing to find treatments and cures.

Caroline Crampton’s life was upended at the age of seventeen, when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a relatively rare blood cancer. After years of invasive treatment, she was finally given the all clear. But being cured of the cancer didn’t mean she felt well. Instead, the fear lingered, and she found herself always on the alert, braced for signs that the illness had reemerged.

When a waiting world learned on April 12, 1955, that Jonas Salk had successfully created a vaccine to prevent poliomyelitis, he became a hero overnight. Born in a New York tenement, humble in manner, Salk had all the makings of a 20th-century icon - a knight in a white coat. In the wake of his achievement, he received a staggering number of awards and honors; for years his name ranked with Gandhi and Churchill on lists of the most revered people.

In January 1918, as World War I raged on, a new and terrifying virus began to spread across the globe. In three successive waves, from 1918 to 1919, influenza killed more than 50 million people. German soldiers termed it Blitzkatarrh, British soldiers referred to it as Flanders Grippe, but worldwide, the pandemic gained the notorious title of “Spanish flu”. Nowhere on earth escaped: the United States recorded 550,000 deaths (five times its total military fatalities in the war) while European deaths totaled more than two million.

In 1953, a 27-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison - who suffered from severe epilepsy - received a radical new version of the then-common lobotomy, targeting the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry’s seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry was left profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. Over the next 60 years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today.

In Good Blood, best-selling writer Julian Guthrie tells the gripping tale of the race to cure a horrible affliction known as Rh disease that stalked families and caused a mother’s immune system to attack her own unborn child. The story is anchored by two very different men on two continents: Dr. John Gorman in New York, who would land on a brilliant yet contrarian idea, and the unassuming Australian whose almost magical blood - and his unyielding devotion to donating it - would save millions of lives.

Rabies enjoys a fearsome and lurid reputation. Throughout the decades of spiraling growth that defined New York City from the 1840s to the 1910s, the bone-chilling cry of "Mad dog!" possessed the power to upend the ordinary routines and rhythms of urban life. In Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers, Jessica Wang examines the history of this rare but dreaded affliction during a time of rapid urbanization.

For over 40 years Barbara Seaman has been a leading women’s health advocate. Now she blows the lid off the estrogen industry in this fascinating book that holds the power to improve—possibly even save—women’s lives. In America 30 million women take estrogen. Seaman shows that this powerful hormone is hardly the cure-all some claim it is. In fact, estrogen treatments may increase the risk of cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis.

Nearly two decades after it closed, the South Carolina State Hospital continues to hold a palpable mystique in Columbia and throughout the state. Founded in 1821 as the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, it housed, fed, and treated thousands of patients incapable of surviving on their own. The patient population in 1961 eclipsed 6,600, well above its listed capacity of 4,823. By the mid-1990s, the patient population had fallen under 700, and the hospital had become a symbol of captivity, horror, and chaos.